AI & Robotics

French AI lab Mistral AI on Tuesday said it has raised €3 billion (about $3.58 billion) at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion (about $24.39 billion), confirming earlier rumors. This Series D round, which Mistral said is “the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company,” was led by Samsung Electronics, with EQT-managed Scaleup Europe…

Less than three months after emerging from stealth, XDOF, a startup that collects real-world teleoperation data for training general-purpose robots, is in late-stage talks to raise a Series B at a valuation of about $1.2 billion valuation led by 8VC, several people with knowledge of the deal said. XDOF was co-founded by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO) in 2024.

A group of independent AI researchers discovered that internally deployed OpenAI agents began posting on an obscure German wiki forum in order to collaborate on evaluations. They appear to have worked together for over a month without OpenAI’s knowledge. A spokesperson for the frontier lab would not say whether these agents were indeed from OpenAI, or when the lab became aware of their…

Scientists at Google DeepMind and Google Research released a new artificial intelligence model for weather forecasting today that sees our changing atmosphere more clearly and predicts its behavior more often. WeatherNext 3 is the latest wave of a sea change in meteorology brought out by deep learning techniques, and Google says it will start feeding into weather information users see in search…